StangStung wrote:
With respect to "First in Flight" and "Birthplace of Aviation" - read carefully. They're both true.
The first flight did take place in NC.
And there can be no doubt that Ohio (and specifically the Dayton area) was the Birthplace of Aviation. That's where all the work up to the first flight, and the subsequent attempts to perfect it at Huffman Prairie, happened.
There's room for both plates for sure.
I'm from NC and IMHO they're both WRONG....
Ohio was actually only the "birthplace" of just
one of the Wright Brothers. Older brother Wilbur was born in Millville, IN in 1867 (maybe the state of Indiana should be getting in on some of this action, too.) Orville was born in Dayton, OH in 1871.
"Aviation" on the other hand, both as an idea and a practical fact, had been "born" or realized long before the Wright Brothers came on the scene. The
Montgolfier Brothers were flying hot-air balloons in Paris in
1783 - 120 years before the Wright Brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk, NC. That qualifies as "aviation". So does
Otto Lilenthal's glider experiments in Germany in
1893 (10 years before the Wrights flew) during which he achieved successful flights of up to 250 meters (820 feet) - far outdistancing the Wright Brothers' first
powered flights.
That is the difference:
North Carolina was only "
First in Powered, Heavier-than-Air Flight" and
Ohio was only "
Birthplace of One of the First Significant Pioneers of Powered, Heavier-than-Air Flight" - but all of that just won't fit on a license plate!
BTW: prior to using "
First in Flight" on its license tags, NC used "
First in Freedom" in reference to it being the first Southern state
after the Civil War (aka the War of Northern Aggression) to free all of its slaves in accordance with President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. That kind of lame-a$$, weak, back-handed claim to fame didn't sit well with too many folks from the peak of the Civil Rights movement in 1964 and onward and it was in the early 1970's that they changed the license tags to what they presumed was the less controversial "First in Flight"
Note however that it wasn't until another 35 or so years later that the US Congress, in one of its seemingly never ending "fits" of nothing-better-to-do passed a non-binding resolution "officially" recognizing the state of Ohio as the "Birthplace of Aviation" - I suspect simply in recognition of the efforts of then Senator John Glenn.
By the same token, according to the US Congress, a tomato is a vegetable (although it is biologically classified as a fruit) just so that ketchup can qualify for school lunch subsidies.